


those who guard the guards themselves

by swu



Series: maybe (in another universe) [7]
Category: Person of Interest (TV), Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, F/F, Families of Choice, Polyamory, Team Dynamics, post-canon (and all the kids are all right)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-11-15
Packaged: 2018-06-10 01:49:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6933088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swu/pseuds/swu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Kara can feel Her in the stars, a silent watcher in the skies. Kara protects the Earth and the Machine protects Kara. Dark and warm and safe, and everywhere at once."</p><p>tumblr prompt: supergirl x poi crossover, i.e. the supersquad interacting with team machine</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. our mutual friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **contents include:** friendship!, some bangs (because why not, everyone should bang), domestic fluff, very little plot, waxing poetic about fighting and artificial intelligences, lessons on proper respect for artisanal chocolates

_Far away, hidden from the eyes of daylight, there are watchers in the skies._  
Euripides, _The Bacchae_ ; quoted by Carl Sagan in _Pale Blue Dot_

_quis custodiet ipsos custodes_

 

* * *

 

 

**i.**

“So this is it, huh? The D-E-O.”

Root drags the letters out, ignoring the half dozen agents who have suddenly turned to face her, weapons raised, and instead craning her neck to admire the various screens lining the walls of the war room.

“Relax, Sam, they’re not going to shoot me.” She strides casually into the room, hands tucked into pockets of her jeans.

“And that goes for you, too, Marvin,” she adds as she comes to a halt in front of J’onn. “Relax.” She’s within arm’s reach, he could grab her or shoot her with the gun he still has aimed at her chest, but he just stares, eyes narrowed, waiting.

“A mutual friend sent us your coordinates. She told us you might be in need of some assistance? Well… we’re it.”

//

Shaw’s not gonna relax, she doesn’t ever get to fucking _relax_ anymore because Root keeps pulling shit like this and of _course_ it’s up to Shaw to make sure she doesn’t get herself killed or eaten by an alien or something—because apparently that’s a thing that could happen now. That’s the world we live in. Fucking _aliens_.

(About fucking time, though, if we’re being honest. Things are finally getting interesting.)

And maybe Root’s right. Shaw reads the hesitance (curiosity, more like) in the room in front of them and sighs, rolling her eyes as she reins in her trigger finger. No one’s getting shot today. (Damn.)

Still— _still_ —Shaw’s point still stands. Just because they’re probably not getting eaten by an alien this time around doesn’t mean Root gets to just throw herself into the waiting jaws of one every time her robot girlfriend feels like phoning home. Yep, Shaw’s definitely still mad that Root dragged her into the fucking desert for this and didn’t even tell her about the whole “extra-normal” part of it until they were free-falling at 12,000 feet above ground level. Definitely mad. Not at all distracted by the fucking beautiful weaponry lining every last inch of this place.

But damn. It _is_ beautiful. Even Shaw hasn’t seen half this tech before; she doesn’t remember the last time that’s happened.

Fucking aliens.

 

 

**ii.**

“Holy shit holy _shit_ you’re _Root_ — _the_ Root.”

Root just smiles cloyingly as she watches Winn scramble up from his seat.

“Kara- Kara, this is the Root who designed the FBI trojan horse of 2009, the null worm that infected over 7 million computers worldwide in less than a week… wow. I-I’m… wow. It’s an _honor_ to meet you.”

Kara mutters, _I’m not even gonna_ pretend _I know what any of those words mean_ , as she tries not to laugh at Winn’s excitement.

Root smiles again, less condescendingly this time, but there’s something distant in her eyes, like she’s slipped slightly out of phase.

“That was a long time ago.”

 

 

**iii.**

Shaw should probably hate her. Everything about her, from the primary-colored spandex to the sunshine and rainbows she’s got coming out her damn ass to the excessive puppy-dog eyes—

Okay so maybe there’s a precedent for certain people slipping through the cracks. Maybe Shaw has a type, when it comes to the people she can tolerate. Maybe it helps if they’re more puppy than human.

No, that’s not it. People like that are still, as a general rule, fucking unbearable.

But there’s something about this girl. Sure, she has all these emotions and occasionally she’ll look like she just wants to be held, but there’s a toughness about her, an iron core underneath it all that is unbreakable in a way that has nothing to do with her superpowers, and that’s—well, it’s not something that Shaw ever anticipated. That this girl who laughs with her whole body at the slightest provocation might have a silence in her too, a part of her that keeps her separate from everyone else, that keeps her quiet beneath all the inexorable optimism and exuberance.

Quiet—and angry.

It finally clicks for Shaw, _really_ clicks, when she sees Kara fight for the first time. They’re in the field, and Shaw’s on the roof of a neighboring building watching through a rifle scope. This kid is still more brawn and moxie than technique, but Shaw can tell she has it in her, that _thing_ that you can’t teach. She’s singularly devoted to the mission, has a protective instinct and a penchant for self-sacrifice embedded in her bones like marrow—and _superpowers_ on top of that? Part of Shaw is _itching_ to get into that kryptonite training room to spar with her, to be the one who gets to temper this ball of raw energy into a force to be reckoned with.

(Sometimes she misses the early days at the ISA, and the Marines before that. Training the new recruits. Leaving a mark—invisible, not recognizable as hers in any way, but there all the same.)

She’s moderately impressed by what she sees. But then something in Kara snaps, and suddenly she’s not a girl in tights anymore. She’s _so young_ sometimes; sometimes she really is still just a kid. But in this moment, she is not. She’s not a girl or a superhero or a being from another planet.

Kara is a thousand years old, and she is ephemeral. She is carved out of stone, out of steel, and she is immaterial, nothing but light and heat and burning.

She screams with everything that Shaw has never been able to voice, focuses everything she is, everything she ever was, into her fists and her eyes and this one single moment.

Her rage is not built on hate, or fear, or a thirst for revenge. There’s grief, yes, Shaw recognizes that. But it’s also something purer, more dangerous. This thing that’s erupting out of Kara in a literal blinding light, it’s rooted in something ancient, eternal. Elemental. It’s woven into the fabric of the universe.

Sameen can feel it from half a block away, how ready Kara is to offer herself up, to give up her body because that’s the only thing she has left to give, to burn through all of herself until there’s nothing left.

A solar flare. A supernova.

Shaw sits back on her heels.

“Well damn, Supergirl.”

 

 

**iv.**

Now the sister—the sister, Shaw takes to immediately. Because Alex gets it, what it’s like to have one of these puppy-humans (-aliens, whatever, close enough), more hurricane than person, in your charge. What it means to be responsible for pulling them back from the edge by the beltloops every time they get too close and pulling them back together when all the universes they hold inside them threaten to burst through their skin. What it is to be the human anchor that grounds someone who is destined for greater things, to be the one who saves the savior.

They fall into an easy camaraderie. Alex, with her healthy appreciation for high-powered firearms, good whiskey, and personal space in equal measure (finally, someone _normal_ around here), she never pushes, never builds up any expectations that Shaw knows she can’t live up to, never asks for anything more than Shaw can give. Never tries to give anything more than Shaw can accept. Alex has her own reasons, different from Shaw’s, but it’s still a relief.

Danvers is a soldier, that much is clear from the way she carries herself, the way she approaches problems, the way she fights.

It’s rare for Shaw to find a sparring partner who can keep up with her, challenge her. They’re not quite evenly matched, physically. Alex may have a superhuman sister to practice with, but Shaw is, well, Shaw. But Alex surprises her, sometimes.

It’s different than sparring with Reese (sparring with Root—let’s not even go there). Reese is all power, blunt and relentless, like waves breaking on the shore. There’s no subtlety about the way he fights, he doesn’t need it. You can see his next move coming from a mile away, but that doesn’t make much of a difference when you’re fighting him. He just keeps coming and coming, wave after wave, wearing you down bit by bit like the rocky cliffs that line the coast.

Alex is all subtlety. She’s clever, quick—she has to be. She came up fighting opponents whose sheer strength she, with her human body, could never hope to match. She’s a human caught in a gods’ war, and she knows it. She fights like each movement might be her last, like any tiny slip might be the one that kills her, because those are the stakes she faces every time she sets foot on the battlefield. She’s calculating, always watching, waiting, biding her time until she can land a single deliberate, measured strike. Because that’s how you survive when you’re a human fighting against forces of nature.

That’s not something you pick up in basic training, it’s not even something they teach the goddamn Delta Force. It’s something that gets drilled into your body over the course of a lifetime when you grow up with an alien sleeping in the top bunk, and when you’re recruited into your agency by a Martian Commanding Officer.

Sameen’s crossed paths with a lot of soldiers in her life, all with different backgrounds, different training.

Alex is something else entirely.

And she keeps finding ways to surprise Shaw; she’s constantly changing, adapting, learning, so she can keep Shaw off-balance (and sometimes literally flat on her back). That doesn’t happen very often (or ever).

Sparring with Alex is something new for the first time in ages. It’s interesting.

Shaw doesn’t hate it.

 

 

**v.**

Shaw keeps catching Alex trying to stitch up her own wounds. She’s got good technique.

“I could have been a doctor, once,” is all Alex offers by way of explanation.

“Yeah. Me too.”

 

 

**vi.**

There’s that one night, after a particularly close call with the latest apocalyptic threat, that they all agree to never speak of again in the future.

After debriefing at HQ, Kara flies straight home to Cat’s, but the rest of them are still too amped—the kind of amped you can only get from the feeling of death brushing the back of your neck—to call it a night. So after a few drinks each out of the not-so-secret, not-entirely-sanctioned stash that Alex keeps in the bottom drawer of the desk in her office, she invites them all over to her place.

No one really knows what the pretense is supposed to be, or if Alex even offered one at all.

By the time they stumble into the backseat of the cab, Root’s already practically mounting Shaw. Lucy sinks leisurely into the center seat, pulling Alex in behind her, and leans her head back so it rests lightly on Alex’s shoulder. She brazenly watches Root and Shaw, expression open and soft in the way that she gets about three drinks in, mildly intrigued by the way they move together—like they’ve been doing this for years, like the rhythm is written into their muscle memory.

She grabs Alex’s hand and starts tangling their fingers together, a lazy smile on her lips.

Alex takes another swig from the bottle in her lap, and then another, until she’s smiling, too, shameless and carefree, back down at Lucy.

//

Alex shows up at the DEO three hours early the next morning and can’t meet anyone’s eyes for about a week. Root and Lucy show up sporting matching unconcealed bruises and unrestrained grins, sharing blatant glances like they’re two seconds away from high-fiving.

Sameen shows up for work and does her _job._

When Kara asks her what the hell happened last night, because apparently Shaw’s the only one of the four of them capable of acting like a goddamn adult, she just rolls her eyes and grunts _children_ under her breath.

 

 

**vii.**

When Root meets Maxwell Lord, purported technological genius and (allegedly) aspiring supervillain, she laughs.

He laughs, too.

He probably shouldn’t have.

//

When Shaw meets General Lane, she stands at attention and salutes. She’s still a soldier, after all.

Then she says, “With all due respect, sir—”

—and punches him in the face.

 

 

**viii.**

One day Shaw comes home to find Gen sitting at the kitchen counter with her toes digging into the fur of a sleeping Bear curled at her feet, determinedly making her way through the biggest ice cream sundae this planet has ever seen.

(Shaw’s gonna have a talk with her about raiding people’s fridges without permission. Breaking and entering is one thing, but come _on_. Gen used the last of the handmade Belgian chocolate Root picked up in Brussels a few Secret Machine Missions ago—Shaw calls them their couples’ retreats—when she was in town to… something about infiltrating NATO? Whatever. The point is, Gen turned gourmet, nigh irreplaceable chocolate into _hot fudge_ and poured it over a bowl of Ben  & Jerry’s. Unacceptable.)

But for now she just tosses her keys onto the counter and sighs. She grabs a spoon and drops herself onto the barstool next to Gen’s.

“How the hell did you even get here?”

“Airplane.”

“Airplane?”

“Big steel thing with wings. Flies.”

“Yeah, I’m familiar with the concept. How did you get _on_ one?”

“I bought a ticket online. Took a cab to the airport, got onboard, and took off.”

Shaw narrows her eyes. “Don’t you have school?”

“Spring break.”

It’s February.

Shaw shrugs.

“You got past the locks on the front door,” Shaw says through a mouthful of ice cream and banana. “Not bad.”

“Yeah, Root got me a new set of lock picks for my birthday.”

Shaw freezes with her spoon halfway to her mouth and glares into the security camera that she knows Root’s hidden in the corner of the room. Gen just licks a drop of melted ice cream that’s inching its way down her wrist and continues smiling happily to herself.

Okay so maybe that’s two conversations Shaw needs to have—one about proper respect when it comes to food and one about proper restraint when it comes to not grooming impressionable children for a life of crime.

//

She ends up bringing Gen in with her to the DEO the next day. It’s breaking a dozen kinds of protocol, but it was either that or tell the kid to stay at the safehouse and let a twelve-year-old try to tail her to a black-ops facility in the middle of the desert on her own.

J’onn is appropriately furious when he comes in to see her spinning in the chair next to Vasquez at mission control, but John (the other John) just chuckles softly, shakes his head, and somehow talks the Director down.

When Supergirl arrives, Gen nearly falls out of her chair in excitement. She pokes at Kara’s shoulder and asks about her superpowers and her senses and her alien physiology until Kara bursts into laughter and finally concedes, dragging the kid down the hall to talk science with Alex.

Shaw mutters something about, _sure, you put on some spandex and a cape and suddenly you’re automatically the coolest person in the room._

And then Root’s behind her, leaning her body into Shaw’s, lips ghosting along the shell of Shaw’s ear as she whispers, “I’m sure we can do something about getting you a cape.”

 

 

**ix.**

Gen insists that she wants to learn about all the aspects involved in being a superhero, including the whole ‘living a double life behind a secret identity’ business.

“For research purposes,” she says.

(She figured out that Kara was Supergirl in about five seconds. She made _Shaw_ in the field, after all, and that was like three years ago. Plus, Kara really is terrible at keeping secrets.)

So, somehow, Kara finds herself riding up the CatCo elevator one morning with a grinning Gen practically bouncing at her side.

She makes Gen promise to stay in her office, even if she has to run out in the middle of the day on Supergirl business, and Gen nods along. It’s a little less than convincing considering Kara has to steer her bodily away from the main bullpen when they arrive on the 40th floor.

Gen does make good on her word for most of the day, sitting cross-legged on the couch in Kara’s office with some article drafts and a red pen that she’s all too happy to put to good use. (Kara had to find _something_ for her to do all day. Turns out Gen’s not a half-bad copyeditor.)

Supergirl does eventually get called away, though, and Gen’s self-control only goes so far.

 

School had let out early for Carter that afternoon and he’s sitting on the couch in Cat’s office with his homework, waiting for his mom to get out of a meeting, when Gen sneaks out of Kara’s office and wanders down the hall to the bullpen.

 

Kara makes it back to CatCo in record time considering she was up against three hostiles at once, but she’s not all that surprised to find her office empty. She gets a text from James telling her that Gen is in Ms. Grant’s office. Sighing as she superspeeds out of her suit, she thanks Rao that at least the kid is still in the building.

 

An hour later, Cat comes back to her office to find Carter and Gen sitting on the floor with papers spread out across the coffee table in front of them, animatedly comparing notes about Supergirl’s photovoltaic capabilities and her maximum flight speed and the limits of her superhearing. The girl herself, meanwhile, has been pacing anxiously in front of Cat’s desk for a solid twenty minutes.

Still standing in the doorway, Cat meets Kara’s eyes across the room. She raises her brows pointedly, and Kara, still not quite sure how she let this happen, just offers a beleaguered shrug in response and silently mouths, _I’m sorry?_

Cat is fully ready to be upset. When she’d agreed to allow Gen (“A foster kid, Cat, just like I was, only she wasn’t lucky enough to get sent to a family like the Danvers…”) to tag along with Kara today, it was under the condition that she would not set foot on the main office floor. Kara is an utterly _hopeless_ disciplinarian, and Cat hates how endearing she finds that fact.

But then her son looks up and immediately runs over for a hug, and Cat forgets that the word _discipline_ even exists in her vocabulary.

So maybe they’re both a little hopeless.

He asks if Gen can come home with them for dinner, and the _yes, alright_ has barely left Cat’s mouth before Carter’s already darting back to help Gen gather their pages of notes (and calculations and diagrams and what looks like a sketch of one Vitruvian Kryptonian).

Kara comes up behind Cat, sliding her arms around her waist, and has the decency to look a little sheepish when she leans in to kiss her lightly on the cheek.

 

 

**x.**

“I understand you’ve had some less-than-friendly interactions with cybernetic interfaces in the past—” J’onn laughs dryly at that “—but trust me, Tars Tarkas, the Machine is on our side.”

Root steps back after she finishes hooking up the final monitor and she looks over at J’onn. He’s standing with his hands on his hips, glaring at the words now appearing across the main command center displays as if he can stare down an artificial superintelligence.

Root looks at the screens and smiles, that bright, dreamy smile reserved just for Her.

“And honestly,” she continues as she turns her attention back to J’onn. “Shimmering cobalt body paint? She has better taste than that.”

//

Harold admires his handiwork and grins, a bouyant, hopeful smile that he hasn’t smiled since the early days of building the Machine with Nathan.

Thanks to alien technology, the Machine really can fit into a suitcase now, and in Her entirety, not just the core heuristics. They patch Her main servers into the processors onboard Kara’s pod—it’s the most complete and functional piece of alien tech the DEO has on site and available for use; the computing power and data compression capabilities are beyond anything humans could hope to achieve in decades at the very least, by Harold’s estimation.

_Your child is a dancing star,_ Finch says softly to himself (to the pod that fell from space, to Her).

She truly does see everything now, things both of this world and not.

She still sends them numbers. Sometimes they’re the same as before, social security numbers that correspond to violent crimes involving ordinary people. But now sometimes the people involved are not so ordinary. The data provided by the DEO’s surveillance tech enables Her to track extra-normal activity as well. She starts detecting metahuman threats and hostile alien attacks; she sees it all before it happens and sends it to them just as she always has, packaged in numbers and a voice in Root’s ear.

//

She speaks to Kara, too, sometimes.

No one really understands the relationship Kara has with the Machine, not even Root. They only know that Kara starts spending less and less time in Alura’s hologram room and more time with Her.

When Alex asks her about it, Kara responds, “My mother is dead. Her AI is… just a memory.”

The Machine is real. Alive.

Kara likes to sit inside her pod to talk to Her. Everyone else is content to read what She has to say on the command center screens, to voice their own thoughts aloud to the room and trust that She will hear them. But Kara climbs back into the pod that carried her two thousand light years, through space and time, and brought her to Earth, and she seals herself in.

She never talks about the time she spends in her pod, alone with the Machine. And it never becomes so frequent that it raises too much concern. But it does settle into a habit, a ritual of sorts.

Alex notices that Kara tends to turn to the Machine after particularly trying days—the days when it becomes all too apparent that she can’t save everyone, when she comes home with blood on her hands.

She’s different when she comes out of the pod. Calmer. Like she’s steeled herself again, prepared to once more shoulder this world that she’s been tasked to carry. (Well, she wasn’t quite _tasked_ with it. She had a choice, but she chose to carry it anyways. She chooses it every day, every time she puts on the suit.)

Alex makes sure no one disturbs her sister when she’s in her pod.

Kara doesn’t have a direct line to the Machine, she’s not an interface like Root is. The Machine is not part of Kara like She is part of Root, like Root is part of Her. But sometimes, Kara can feel Her presence even when she’s nowhere near the DEO, when she’s ten thousand feet up and halfway across the country.

Sometimes, at the edges of Kara’s consciousness, Her name gets mixed up with Rao’s.

Kara can feel Her in the stars, a silent watcher in the skies. Kara protects the Earth and She protects Kara. Dark and warm and safe, and everywhere at once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This prompt was for a few brief headcanons, but then I got lost and couldn't find my way out. But I am in LOVE with this crossover and with all my favorite people interacting with each other, so I'm probably going to continue this.
> 
> I meant to split the POV between different characters, but it ended up being mostly Shaw and Kara POV because I am me. I will definitely explore more from other perspectives in later chapters.
> 
> Also I may have shamelessly lifted some dialogue from Ally McBeal (of all things??? I don't know, it works. I think.)


	2. rescue shelter for wayward aliens

Sometimes Shaw gets up in the morning to find Kara asleep on her living room floor, curled up with Bear, their limbs entwined. Apparently, Cat won’t let them get a dog—yet; Kara’s wearing her down—and Kara and Bear fall in love with each other instantly. Birds of a feather, after all. Or… dogs. Whatever.

And sometimes you just need some Bear time, Shaw gets it. Bear’s pretty great.

She even accepts that Kara comes as a package deal with a pubescent boy who’s also in constant need of some dog love. Okay, that’s fine, every kid deserves some regular dog time, and Shaw even likes this one. A lot, actually.

(When he introduces himself the first time they meet, she smiles. “Carter, huh?”

“Yeah, I just said that,” he responds.)

And this kid is- well, she likes him. He’s a good kid.

One time he quietly jokes that he likes Bear more than most people, only it isn’t really a joke. Shaw points out that Bear _is_ better than most people, objectively speaking, so that just means Carter has good taste in the company he keeps.

Shaw sometimes hires Carter to walk Bear when she’s out of town on a mission, or when she’s too busy at the DEO, or when it’s Saturday and she knows Carter hasn’t seen him in a while.

So Carter isn’t actually a problem at all. He’s painfully responsible for a 13-year-old, and whenever he comes over, he generally leaves the place in better shape than it was when he arrived.

But _Kara_ , on the other hand… Between Kara “I forgot there was a wall there” Danvers and You Can Call Me “it was only a _small_ rocket launcher” Root, Shaw’s never getting the security deposit back on this place. Not that she ever actually put down a security deposit, considering they’re still still living in a safehouse that Finch owns, but it’s the principle behind the thing. And Shaw really wishes they didn’t need the regular weekly shipment of spackle and replacement drywall from Home Depot that she’d begrudgingly set up a month after they moved to National City.

Kara is so mortified every time she accidentally elbows through a wall or crushes a doorknob or rips a door off its hinges that she insists on repairing it herself. She does a good job, too. She’s meticulous and clearly knows her way around a drywall repair. You’d never be able to tell she was there.

Meticulous, Root is not. At least not about things like this—you know, ones that involve physical objects. Immediately following the first rocket launcher incident, Shaw makes the mistake of telling Root that if she causes any explosive-related structural damage to the apartment, she has to clean it up herself. When Shaw gets home, she’s greeted with one big room where their living room and bedroom used to be (and Root standing in the middle of it all, glaring at a power sander like it’s to blame). That’s the last time Shaw ever leaves Root alone with power tools.

Well, if there’s an expectation of things getting fixed, that is. There are plenty of other uses for power tools that Root _excels_ at.

Why _she’s_ always the one who ends up taking in all the strays, Sameen will never understand. When she grumbles something along those lines at HQ one time, Harold snorts violently, and John has to make them all promise to not make fun of Harold for the sencha-out-the-nose incident in the future.

Even though it’s technically the apartment she shares with Root, Shaw still thinks of the strays as flocking to her, seeing as Root was one herself until Shaw quietly tricked her into finally buying herself a damn home a few years back. Well, she’d strong-armed the Machine into helping, though that ended up being a bust because clearly She is incapable of following simple instructions—that first loft in New York ended up being Shaw’s new place too (to this day she’s still not quite sure how), and that was very much _not_ part of the original plan.

Shaw gripes about this a lot, falls back on the all the classic misanthropic standbys. She complains about how much she misses having open space, free of Root’s computer shit strewn all over every surface and with enough room for her guns (she had to rent a storage locker, and that’s where 70% of her weaponry lives now—in _storage_ ); about how much of a pain it is to clean up the alien insect slime that Kara always seems to track into the apartment every time she crash-lands in the living room to regroup after a nasty fight—when she’s fading fast and can’t make it all the way back to the DEO, Kara pretty much just picks whoever’s place is closest and sets her autopilot for a window or a balcony and hopes for the best; about how if she and Root had wanted another puppy, they’d adopt one; about how she never has any privacy anymore, what with the revolving door of stray aliens and precocious juvenile delinquents and the occasional DEO agent (Alex), all of whom apparently think it’s socially acceptable to just show up at someone’s place without warning and invite themselves to crash on their couch.

But after the first time she discovers Kara asleep in a puppy pile with Bear, a new “dog bed” appears beneath the east-facing window in the living room the next day. It dwarfs Bear, and it’s not like he’s a small dog, but it fits him and up to two adult humans very comfortably. (Shaw’s guessing. She most certainly has not conducted experiments.)

She starts grocery shopping in bulk and stocks up with triple her usual, and Shaw’s usual is already pretty impressive. Or terrifying, depending on who you ask. There’s always a six pack of Alex’s favorite beer in the fridge and they’re never out of those special coffee beans that Lucy is partial to.

Of course, _Shaw’s_ not the one doing all this. She insists that it’s really the Machine pulling most of the weight, scheduling automated grocery deliveries and monitoring the house’s inventory. The only thing Shaw ever has to do, at the very most, is mention to Her if they need to add something new to the list. And it’s not like she’s doing this entirely selflessly—she figures a starving, exhausted Kryptonian is more likely to disturb the peace than a well-fed, sleeping one. She’s just trying to tip the scales back toward some semblance of peace and quiet, that’s all.

Everyone’s acutely aware of this, of Shaw and Root and the fact that this is their space, and they do their best to respect it. But, they’re strays. And these ones aren’t retired assassins looking for a halfway house, they’re not like Shaw and the others were when Finch brought them together. They still have some goodness left in them—some youth and hope, something loving and gentle and kind—but these kids are fighting a war that could very easily break them, turn them hard. And for some reason, Shaw can’t stomach that idea, can’t bear to simply stand by and watch it happen.

Shaw is not young or gentle or loving. She’s not sure if she was _ever_ young, not really. There are a lot of things she can’t be, would never want to be, not even for these kids who are fighting every day with everything they have and then some. Who don’t deserve all the shit that this world and all the other worlds in this universe are throwing at them. So she gives them what she can: some creature comforts and a shelter in the storm.

//

A few months into this… whatever this is, Sameen rents another place two blocks away. Well, Root leaves listings open on her computer and Shaw sees them, but Shaw believes that she thought of the idea all on her own.

Ostensibly it’s an art studio, where Shaw can shut her brain off and shut the world out and just paint without having to endure Finch’s horrified gasps about reclaimed Caribbean rosewood flooring or 18th-century hand-knotted Persian rugs. She keeps the place spartan, all high ceilings and brick walls painted clean white and concrete floors that are soothingly cold beneath bare feet. After a week there’s a mattress in the corner, and two days later a minifridge. Root screws some hooks into the wall, installs blackout shades above the floor-to-ceiling windows, and leaves a black leather trunk in the corner with a bow on it. (A simple drywall patch she can’t handle, but constructing a sex dungeon is apparently no problem.)

Shaw hasn’t moved out of the safehouse, that’s not what this is. She still lives with Root and Bear and their regular recurring cast of vagrants. (Back in New York, Bear used to live with Harold, but after Samaritan, Bear _insisted_ that he move in with Shaw. And he can be very convincing when he wants to be.) She very rarely stays in the studio overnight; these days, as much as Shaw wants to deny it, sleeping in a bed alone feels kind of unsettling most of the time. The mattress is only there for quick power naps and other… activities.

No one but Root is allowed to visit the studio. No one else is even supposed to know about it at all. And Root is always careful about asking Shaw before she comes by.

They both need space, sometimes.

Root still has her special missions for the Machine. They’ve been shorter lately; She’s trying not to keep Root away as much. But Shaw can always tell when it’s been a little too long since Root last hopped a jet to some city on the other side of the world where she can slip anonymously into the crowd and into someone else’s skin for a few days. When Root’s starting to itch for it.

So Shaw finds Root a terrorist cell to infiltrate or some secrets that need stealing or a foreign dignitary ready to be turned or a weapons manufacturing facility that’s been getting a little too innovative for its own good. And Root drops a secret loft in Shaw’s lap.

//

One day, Shaw finds a box on the studio’s doorstep containing a dozen jars of loose pigments and a tin of linseed oil. Instead of a color, each pigment is labeled with the name of a mineral and a place. There’s a note tucked between < _Liddicoatite (Tsarafara, Madagascar)_ > and < _Meteorite, Unknown Origin (California, USA) – Not Kryptonite!!_ > that reads,

> _I can never get all the colors I want with the store-bought ones._

It’s not signed. Kara knew she didn’t need to, Shaw would know.

Sameen’s not sure how Kara found out about any of this, the studio or the art. She knows that Kara paints—she’s seen Kara come in to the DEO with flecks of ultramarine under her nails or a smudge of vermillion along the side of her neck. But Shaw never talks about painting; that’s not a part of her life she readily shares with anyone. Even Root’s only seen glimpses of her work.

Shaw thinks maybe she should be upset, should feel like this is an invasion of privacy, but she knows she isn’t really in any place to judge someone for listening in on a friend. If _Shaw_ had superhearing, there wouldn’t be a single secret left unheard in a 50-mile radius.

She looks down at the box again and she understands. It’s a thank you and it’s an apology. Placed on the doorstep of Shaw’s Loft of Solitude, it’s an acknowledgement of how Kara and her friends had barreled into Shaw’s life, uninvited and without warning, and of how much Shaw has given them when she very easily and understandably could have turned them away.

Kara doesn’t push. She never brings it up, never tries to bond over art or share her work with Shaw. This isn’t something she wants credit for. She just gives Shaw the slightest nod when they see each other the next day, and they both move on.

//

Shaw scrapes the glass of her palette completely clean for the first time since she started using it. Tips a small pile of pigment onto the surface and carefully works the oil in. She usually loves the metallic twang of a palette knife flexing as she mixes paints, but it seems too loud for this moment, echoing in the openness of the space.

The colors are unbelievable, iridescent.

Shaw’s not quite sure what to do with them. Yet.

//

Kara wakes up one morning at the safehouse and, after gently extracting herself from underneath 80 pounds of unconscious Belgian Malinois (by now she’s gotten the hang of floating Bear and flipping them without waking him), notices a slip of paper folded around Bear’s collar.

> _Cumengite (BC Sur, Mexico) ?_
> 
> _Thanks._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure about the actual viability of using those minerals as pigments (in terms of tinting strength, permanence, lightfastness, etc.) but I took some artistic license because I love the idea of Kara flying around and finding rare, colorful rocks and just pulverizing them between her fingertips and turning them into paints. Kara basically collected a box of cool rocks for Shaw to try to make friends.
> 
> Fun fact Root called Shaw's loft her "Fortress of Shawlitude" once and got banned from visiting said fortress for a week.


	3. a legacy to protect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shaw, Lucy, Alex + how to protect your father’s legacy (and bear the weight of his sins). [~~Alien Jesus and A.I. Jesus~~](http://cylon.tumblr.com/post/145330383193) Kara and Root discuss self-sacrifice and how to come back from the dead. Everyone is a Greek Mythology nerd because I said so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably fairly obvious, but I’m basically ignoring s5 of poi (because I still haven’t actually watched it yet for Reasons). For the purposes of this fic, though, Root actually did die. But obviously she is alive now. So everything is fine :)

_And if there’s a reason I’m still alive_  
_When everyone who loves me has died,_  
_I’m willing to wait for it._

 

* * *

 

**i.**

“Shit, sorry. Didn’t mean to—”

“No, no it’s fine, stay. I’m just- the General’s on site.”

Sameen hesitates for a moment. She stays.

Folding herself down next to Lucy, Shaw edges forward on the flat rock, baked hot beneath the midday sun, until she’s got one foot dangling over the side of the cliff and the other knee pressed up to her chest.

They’re looking out over the Pacific, along the stretch of coast that the DEO uses for aquatic training exercises. It takes a fair bit of maneuvering to get up here—the type of maneuvering that generally warrants harnesses and belay devices. That’s why Lucy picked the spot.

Shaw made it up carrying two bottles of beer in one hand.

She cracks one open, still looking out over the water as she offers it to Lucy. “So you’re hiding.”

“Lately things haven’t been—” Lucy clears her throat. “Well isn’t that what _you’re_ doing right now? Hiding?” she deflects, teasing. She pauses and looks at Shaw for a moment before leaning back again with her hands braced on the ground behind her. “I heard about yesterday.”

“Oh please,” Shaw scoffs. “I’m not scared of him. I’m not gonna climb up 50 feet of rock face to hide because of _that_.”

Lucy raises an eyebrow. “I dunno, last time someone knocked out General Lane… well, I don’t think it’s ever actually happened before, but I’m pretty sure he’s disappeared people for less.” She takes a large sip of beer, smiling like she’s twelve years old again and Lois just got caught sneaking back into the house at 3am. “And in front of his men? Wouldn’t put it past him to wipe the slate completely, erase any record of your existence on this planet.”

“Well it’s a good thing I don’t exist then.”

Lucy laughs. She lies down flat on her back and balances her bottle on her sternum for a second before placing it on the rock beside her. She stretches out, eyes closed and a soft smile on her lips as she feels the sun seeping into her skin.

They sit like that for a long time, quiet and small facing the wide expanse of ocean. Shaw stares out at the horizon until her eyes sting and the boundary between sea and sky begins to blur.

“You never asked why I did it,” Shaw says. It’s not a question. Lucy hums but doesn’t open her eyes.

“No, I didn’t.”

 

//

 

A few days later, Shaw’s overseeing hand combat drills, watching from an observation booth off the main room where Root and Kara are sparring.

An alien depowered vs. a tiny doe of a human with a God in her ear. It’s an interesting matchup. Even without her powers, Kara still has steel in her spine, in her fists, plating the muscles beneath her skin. She strikes with sledgehammer blows, a battering ram inside a girl.

Shaw would be concerned about Root—the woman’s got bird bones; sometimes as Shaw traces them with her fingertips, she thinks they might be hollow, more air than calcium—but when Root fights, it’s with an impossible certainty. Her body doesn’t move through space so much as diffuse into it, blurring at the edges, skin shimmering like she might blink out of existence at any moment and appear somewhere else. The only blows that Kara manages to land are glancing. Shaw smirks.

Root’s blood is laced with a fearlessness that stems from an infuriatingly reckless sense of invincibility—or disregard for her own life, Shaw’s not quite sure which. Both, probably. Kara has that too, she realizes. She still thinks Root should have outgrown it by now, though, considering she’s died once already and Shaw’s sure that even Root only has the one Lazarus act in her.

Shaw watches, transfixed, as they weave through the space around each other. They’re both laughing, almost, breathing heavily through exhilarated grins.

A voice from the doorway cuts through the silence, pulling Shaw back again.

“You know, I’ve been trying to place you.”

Lucy’s been watching from the hall for a few minutes, but after a beat she finally steps into the room, arms crossed tightly over her chest. “I monitor all the ops we run; it’s my job. And you, the way you work… it was familiar.” She pauses. “I finally figured it out. Catalyst Indigo 5a.”

Sameen’s head jerks toward Lucy slightly, eyes cast downward, but otherwise she remains completely still. “How do you know that name?”

Lucy doesn’t look at Shaw, just stands beside her and determinedly stares straight ahead. “My father’s a four-star general in the United States Army. I heard stories. I mean, _you_ —well, you were practically a legend.”

Lucy hesitates, still unable to meet Shaw’s eyes, and her voice is soft when she continues. “I’m sorry,” she says. The words come out slowly, lingering heavy and thick at the back of her throat. A crease forms between Shaw’s brows— _sorry_ is a terrible word, really. She has no idea why Lucy’s saying it.

“He knew. About all of it.”

And it hits her, the final piece. Shaw’s eyes flutter shut for half a second. “Samaritan.”

She hadn’t known this part of it when she’d met the man a few days prior, when they’d had the conversation that left Sameen’s knuckles bloody and the General with a shiner only half as bruised as his ego. Shaw had read his record, reports of his interactions with aliens—both extraterrestrial and not. And she’d seen how Kara and Alex looked at him when he entered the room, had seen written in every line of their bodies everything that they, the good soldiers that they are, could never say to him. No, it hadn’t been personal at the time, not beyond a general hatred for xenophobic white men in positions of power—it was more of a public service than anything else.

It _hadn’t_ been personal, at the time.

“He’s _General Sam Lane_.” Lucy says his name with an exaggerated reverence. Then scoffs. “Of course he knew.”

“He wasn’t… _involved_. It wasn’t his purview, but he- he knew. Even after Myriad, after everything that happened here, he knew about… he knew and he didn’t say anything. Didn’t do _anything_ to stop it.”

“Yeah. Well.” Shaw inhales deeply, willing the tension out of her jaw. “That’s over. Has been for a while now.”

Not that that changes anything that happened. Not that it makes it any better.

Shaw’s still haunted by it. She’s always carried a lot of ghosts, built up over a lifetime of war (a lifetime of leaving and being left behind). She’s never minded. Ghosts are better than no ghosts, she’d always thought. Better than nothing at all. Ghosts are proof that someone had been there once, at least; that they had existed, enough to leave something behind. Proof that time is moving forward, that the world is still solid and real and that Shaw is still a part of it. There’s proof that she is alive in the very fact that they are not.

Well. They _were_ better than nothing, before. But the ghosts that Samaritan placed on her shoulders, knitted into her bones—those ones are different. They’re her own. Thousands of broken shells of herself, echoes upon echoes forever reverberating inside the one that survived.

She can’t tell why Lucy looks the way she does right now, like she’s haunted too. She thinks she should be annoyed, maybe, that this girl who’s always sporting designer heels and a perfect manicure has the audacity to look like that, because what could she possibly know about it. But here she is, standing shoulder to shoulder with Shaw, dressed in all black with a ramrod posture that Shaw knows so well, and it seems like there might be something after all.

It’s not pity in Lucy’s voice. Her _sorry_ wasn’t born out of sympathy or compassion or whatever other bullshit people normally feel when they know (or what Shaw would expect them to feel, that is, if anyone from the outside actually knew).

Shaw feels the rigidity in Lucy’s spine, her shoulders, the set of her jaw.

It’s guilt. Responsibility.

Lucy has a weight steeped into her bones, too, only _her_ weight is still alive, still casting a shadow over everything she does, everything she is and everything she might ever become. It has a name, and that name is sitting on her chest, pinned to her lapel, pinned to her every achievement—an inescapable condition of her existence. It has four stars and a self-aggrandized certainty, a particular brand of righteousness that is only possible in someone so much larger than life that the sun can’t reach the things trying to grow out of the ground at his feet.

But beyond the name, the weight, the shadow, there’s something else there, underneath it all. Something that stirs in Shaw’s ghosts, too—in her very first one, the one whose tattoo she wears on the skin beneath her sleeve.

She can see it in the tightness of Lucy’s arms where they’re crossed, wrapped around herself, in the desperate grip of her fingers around her own bicep, in the way her lips press together and her nose flares with each measured breath.

Sameen shifts uncomfortably.

 _Sins of the father._ It would be so much easier if that’s all it was.

 

**ii.**

It’s a powerful thing, to be your father’s daughter. To grow up in his shadow, yes, but to feel comforted by it instead of stifled. It’s warm and safe in the dark, where you can look up and trace the edges of the shape into which you were meant to mold yourself. You can build yourself in his image, because you _know_ , with a solid certainty, just how hard you need to push yourself, how far you need to reach, who you need to become.

It happens in different ways, that bond forged by loss and tragedy—things that might take the same shape or cast the same shadows silhouetted against the bright outer edges of your world, but that still manage to tear a hole, to leave a void in their wake, that’s made just for you.

When Ella Lane died, it tore a deep fissure in Lucy’s world. Her sister wound up on the other side of it, and their family drifted further and further apart until Lois almost wasn’t a part of it anymore, not as anything more than a bright technicolor blur streaking through Lucy’s life. Not as anything real.

From the very beginning, Lois had always been the golden child, shining so brightly just by virtue of being _Lois_ that everyone else in the room looked dim in comparison. Like Ella was, once—loud and bright and mesmerizing. Lois was her mother’s daughter, through and through; the two of them were the binary stars around which Lucy had always orbited as a child.

And so when their mother died—when she _left_ them, alone, floundering in transit without a center around which to orbit—she pulled Lois with her. Ella may have been a ghost, but even when they were growing up together in the same house, Lois was a mirage, more a kaleidoscope of stories than a sister. She had already left Lucy long before she finally left home.

And that’s the way it went, leaving and leaving, leaving Lucy behind until all she had left was her father. And he became her whole world.

General Lane wasn’t a bad father. Sure, he had absolutely no idea how to raise two teenage girls on his own, he was sometimes alarmingly obtuse—one would think that, given his esteemed career, he’d be a little more observant and aware of the things happening in his own home—and he mostly treated his abruptly increased paternal responsibility as another military campaign to execute, but the point is he tried.

And that was precisely what drove Lois away. The fact that he tried too hard, pushed too relentlessly. The fact that, in his own misguided way, he loved them—far too much.

It’s somewhat surprising that for this man, who grew up in the military and had known nothing else in his entire life, his wife’s death was the first time he’d ever truly felt the brush of mortality, and the fear that comes with it. 

He was overcome with a desperate need to take his girls under his wing and to keep them safe, to protect them in all the ways that he had failed to protect his wife, to raise them right.

To raise them so they’d make Ella proud. To raise them as a legacy for himself.

And Lucy wanted that, too, more than anything. She wanted to be everything to her father, to be his perfect daughter, to succeed where Lois had failed (where she had refused to even try).

Lucy wanted to make her father believe she could be everything he’d lost—because she wanted so desperately to believe that he could be everything _she_ had lost.

When Lucy finds herself sitting across a table from Alex Danvers in an interrogation room, she sees that same loss, that same desperate need, starting back at her in Alex’s eyes.

(They later joke that this was their first date.)

It takes her a while to pinpoint it. She almost misses it, almost lets Alex go, but when Alex is standing up to leave, she figures it all out. She figures Alex out, realizes that the ghosts they both carry are fundamentally the same. Their fathers loom just a little too large, their sisters shine a little too bright, and they’ve both spent their lives trying to mold themselves into something that might fill the void left by what they’ve lost.

“He told you he’s protecting you,” Lucy says, and she’s not quite sure if she’s talking about J’onn and Alex anymore. “He made you believe he was the father you lost,” she says, and she wonders if maybe she lost a father somewhere along the way, too. It’s hard to tell when all you ever see is his shadow.

It’s a powerful thing, to be your father’s daughter. To follow in his footsteps, to try to fill his shoes. To create yourself in his image.

Lucy’s not quite sure when everything changed—when she stopped trying to protect her family’s legacy by becoming everything General Lane ever wanted her to be and started desperately trying to protect her family’s legacy from the man himself. When she finally outgrew his shadow, outgrew the guilt that had tethered her to him ever since Ella’s death.

Probably sometime between slapping cuffs on Alex (well, the first time she ever slapped cuffs on Alex) and chasing down a semi on a motorcycle to bust her out of a high security military transport en route to purgatory.

(It was one hell of a first date.)

 

**iii.**

“What’s it like?” Kara asks. “Dying?”

Root stops typing but doesn’t look up from where she’s been curled up on the couch for the past few hours, a screen full of Kryptonian script beaming up at her and the omegahedron from Fort Rozz glowing softly on the coffee table (they’d helped the DEO repossess it from Max Lord and General Lane after their harebrained Pinky and the Brain scheme backfired spectacularly).

Kara had decided to stay after taking Bear out for his walk earlier in the evening, sprawling out on the floor and playing quietly with him while Root worked. They have nights like this fairly regularly—when Cat’s stuck at the office because distracting herself with mountains of work on days when Carter’s at his father’s is a habit she still hasn’t managed to break, and Shaw and Alex are busy tracking down a hostile intergalactic fugitive (no Supergirl required, they always insist), Kara will sometimes find an excuse to hang out at the safehouse.

They don’t talk very much, usually, when they’re sitting across from each other, working into the night. Since Root started teaching herself to code in Kryptonese, she’ll occasionally throw out a question about language syntax or alien technology that Kara might be familiar with, but beyond that, the two of them are content to simply _be_. They never discuss why Kara stays for so long; they never mention that Root rarely works at home unless someone is there, that on nights when Kara doesn’t show up, Root camps out at the DEO, bent over her laptop for hours until she passes out on the cot in her office. There is a comfort in the silence between them, an understanding that doesn’t require words.

And so Kara’s voice is small when she asks, terrified of breaking some unspoken agreement between them or crossing some boundary that she knows must be there but can’t really pinpoint. The Machine had shared a rough account with her of what had happened in New York, and for a long time she’d convinced herself that that was enough, that she didn’t need to know any more than that. Because Kara may be terrible at keeping secrets, but when it comes to things like this—things left unspoken because the words simply don’t exist to describe them, because those memories are a singular burden that is not meant to be shared—Kara understands better than anyone.

But it chews away at her, pushing outward until Kara feels herself cracking, a planet on the verge of collapse. Because maybe Root _does_ have the words; maybe Root can help Kara make sense of the chaos in the universe, infinite and cold and _cruel_ ; maybe, for as much as Kara knows they both keep these things buried deep within the darkest parts of themselves to protect the ones they love from the pain of it, as aware as she is of the _choice_ they both made to carry worlds on their shoulders—maybe Root needs someone to help her bear it too.

 _What’s it like_ , Kara asks.

Kara asks what it feels like to die, because as prepared and willing as she is, as certain as she is now of her purpose, there’s still some small, shameful part of her that is afraid. She asks about dying because she watched her whole planet die and she dreams, sometimes, about some alternate universe where she was still on it when it did.

She asks about dying, but more than that she wants to ask, _how do you stand it_ —feeling so much, hurting so much, loving so much? How can you bear knowing what you know, being one with a god and carrying everything She sees inside yourself? How do you go on, how do you live with the memory of so many people who have died, with so many ghosts trailing in your wake?

How do you come back? When you’ve known for so long what you were meant for—when you’ve always known who you are and where you’re headed—but then, after the light of Rao finally takes you in, you find yourself being spit back out?

Kara asks about dying, but what she really wants to know is—

_How do you keep on living?_

Root shuts her laptop softly and sets it aside, then traces a finger along a ridge on the omegahedron until it goes dark, before finally looking up at Kara.

“I don’t know,” she says after what feels like an eternity. “I don’t remember it. _She_ does, more or less. She- I know the things She’s told me. I know I was shot. I died. And then I woke up six feet under—” she smiles humorlessly “—in a lab. A secret facility beneath DC. A laboratory inside a labyrinth.”

“Cadmus,” Kara supplies.

Root nods. “I remember bits and pieces after that. Fragments, that feel almost like- like glimpses of someone else’s memories. I’ll get flashes—or, _She_ gets them. We’ll come across something that triggers a memory, and I’ll feel it too, but it doesn’t happen like it usually does with Her. I mean, She’s a machine. Her memory is supposed to be infallible, objective. But these… these are more like glitches, moments of déjà vu, like the data is corrupted somehow and I’m seeing the space where a memory used to be.”

She pauses, eyes shifting to the side and out of focus for a second. Whatever the Machine says to her, Root just clears her throat with a rough shake of her head and inhales sharply before looking back up at Kara.

“Anyways. Nothing is really clear again until after Sameen came for me.”

“She broke you out. Brought you back.” Kara beams. “You saved the world and then she saved you.”

“No.” Root’s voice is soft but she lights up when she says it, a smile on her lips and stars in her eyes. “I didn’t. I died. _She_ saved the world. And then she saved me, too. Again.”

Kara stares at Root, brow furrowing. When she does this, looks at people like she can see straight through them in a way that has nothing to do with x-ray vision, she’s not Kara Danvers anymore. She’s not even Supergirl. Her eyes are _blue_ blue, sharp and unblinking. Alien.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget what she is, but in these moments, everything she’s built on top of herself falls away (the girl, the superhero) and all that’s left is _Kara_. The last heir to a proud house and a dead race, named in an inhuman tongue after a goddess traced in an alien sky thousands of light years away. The final living descendant of a god, a star—the sun incarnate.

Root stares right back. She’s never been one to wilt beneath the gaze of a god.

And she understands. Kara’s always seen it in her, felt it in her presence—Root _knows_ what it is to be in search of something. To spend your life searching for place and a purpose. For an answer, some truth about the universe that would allow her to finally make sense of it all.

Shaw came back for Root and—

“You came back… for _her_.”

“No.” Root shakes her head again, but her smile doesn’t falter. “I would have, if I could—I’d have found my way back to her. She is- she would have been enough. She’s the only place I ever really belonged.”

She takes a slow, deep breath.

“But… this wasn’t my doing. It wasn’t my choice. In reality, it had nothing to do with what I wanted or how much I wanted it. I came back because someone, some human, decided to play god and bring me back. There wasn’t some great cosmic purpose behind it. The reason I’m still alive, the _plan_ that they brought me back to play a part in— _that_ was thought up by a human. The universe doesn’t have a plan for us. We are just… particles of light, waves in the fabric of spacetime. The _something greater_ that we’re a part of—that’s all it is. The universe itself. The universe didn’t need to bring me back for that to still be true.”

The silence between them is heavier now, a weight settling in Kara’s lungs. But then Root laughs, all teeth and windchimes.

“You’re right, though,” Root says. “ _My_ reason—the reason I can make the choice I make every day, to keep fighting, to be better, to be _good_ … it’s her.”

 

**iv.**

Alex finds out by accident.

Kara hadn’t meant to let it slip. Not that she was purposefully trying to keep it from her sister, but with how little Root and the Machine actually knew about what had happened, she didn’t see a point in telling her. They didn’t have enough concrete intel to make much of a difference in the search for Project Cadmus, and it would only get Alex’s hopes up again.

And then Alex would run off, again, without a second thought, and blindly throw herself into dangers that Kara can’t protect her from. Again.

Well. Kara knows Alex better than anyone. Before she even has a chance to realize what she’d said, Alex is already halfway down the hall to the armory.

Root looks up when Alex comes storming into the room, a frantic Kara in her wake. (Shaw just raises her eyebrows and keeps her focus locked intently on the rifle she’s cleaning.)

“Root. You were at Cadmus?” Alex says in disbelief as she crosses the threshold. “You were there, and you got _out_? How could you not say anything? You _knew_ I was- how could you watch me grasp at the most pathetic, flimsy leads, day after day, when you’ve known where it was this whole time?”

Kara glances apologetically at Root as she tries to cut in. “Alex, come on, she didn’t—”

“No, it’s fine, Kara,” Root interrupts calmly as she turns to face Alex. “What do you want to know?”

Alex stares her down for a few moments before she makes a choice that spurs her back into motion again. She marches toward an ammunition locker on the far side of the room, grabbing a large black tactical duffel off the wall as she goes. 

“You know what, it doesn’t matter,” she snaps as she starts clearing out full shelves of ammo and sweeping it all haphazardly into her bag. “You’re gonna give me the coordinates and set me up with a line to the Machine, and I’m going. You can come with me if you want, but I’m _going_ , whether you help me or not.”

“Alex…” Root shakes her head slowly. “I don’t know where it is anymore. Neither does She. I can give you the coordinates where Shaw found me, but that won’t help you find Cadmus. It’s not going to lead you to Jeremiah.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Alex asks distractedly as she continues packing various firearms.

“It’s not there anymore, Alex. No one knows where Camus is.”

With an exasperated sigh, Alex finally stops amassing her portable arsenal. “But you were _there_ ,” she pushes, frowning at Root. “How do you not have any- you’re saying _She_ doesn’t even know where it is? Then how did Shaw find you?”

“The Machine located _me_ , not Cadmus. She was able to lead Shaw to me, but when we went back to where Shaw found me, it was gone.”

“So they knew they’d been compromised, they cleared out, relocated—we can trace that,” she dismisses, turning away from Root again to grab a few grenades out of a cabinet. She considers them briefly before stuffing them into her pants pocket. “We can find a way to track them to their new facility.”

Root follows Alex as she frantically crosses the armory, pulling a few more guns off the wall as she goes. “No, it wasn’t empty. It was _gone_. We went back less than 36 hours later, and all we found was pristine, untouched earth. And Her records of the place, too—same thing. She’s completely blind to it. I told your sister this, it’s a glitch. Shaw said it was this massive Daedalian labyrinth underground… covering that up overnight couldn’t have been easy, and it most definitely wasn’t the work of humans alone.”

Alex pauses, closing her eyes for a moment and taking in a deep, heavy breath through her nose, before she turns back toward Root.

“Think about it, Alex.” Root, growing increasingly frustrated, jerks her head toward J’onn’s office. “When Valentine Michael Smith did his little martian mind-meld trick—” she stops when Shaw catches her eye, then continues more slowly. “When J’onn read Colonel Harper’s mind, he saw Jeremiah at Project Cadmus, right? He saw inside Cadmus, but you haven’t gotten any further than that, have you? And Lucy—Lucy was ready to send you there, but any actual information about the place was above her pay grade. No one knows where it is. That’s not hyperbole, Alex, it’s true. I can’t help you find it.”

Alex stares at her for a moment, eyes darting between Root’s, before she shakes her head, apparently deciding that she isn’t going to back down. “Nope, no, you’re wrong,” she says through clenched teeth. “You must have missed something. Once Shaw got you out, you didn’t have any reason to really give a shit about Cadmus anymore. There was nothing left for you there, but…” She softens slightly. “They have my dad, Root.” She turns to Shaw, desperation bleeding through her anger. Her voice breaks, pleading, almost. “He’s my _father_.”

Shaw is almost preternaturally still—still sitting with a half-disassembled weapon in her lap, parts neatly arranged on the table in front of her—but she looks up and unflinchingly meets Alex’s gaze.

“I’m not abandoning him. I’m not going to give up on him, not again. I can’t keep hiding underground in this fucking bunker—” she slams the side of her fist against the wall “—and just leave him in that place, _alone_. I am not that person, that is not the person I’m gonna be. I am not going to wait for some sign from the universe, some goddamn augury to point the way, and just sit here twiddling my thumbs for another ten years. Not when there is something I can do about it this time around.”

She shoulders her duffel, carrying what seems like half the DEO’s armory, and makes to walk out, but Root catches her by the arm.

“Okay, you want a sign? _Cadmus._ ”

Alex’s eyes flick to the hand on her bicep and then up to Root’s face.

“A Cadmean victory. That is the best possible outcome you can hope for. If you go charging in now, half-cocked, alone? You’re gonna get yourself killed, Alex. There is no way you can win this, not really. Because even if you find him, even if you succeed, you don’t know what the price will be for that victory. Things like this, they don’t come for free—trust me, I know. And I know how it feels to not care about any of that. But we cannot afford to win this battle if it means losing the war. If it means losing you.”

When Alex responds, there’s iron in her eyes and a razor edge to her voice. “You’re mixing your metaphors, Root. I am not Cadmus in this story. That would be the good old United States Government, trying to slay their mythical alien beast to sow its teeth in the earth. Well you know what? I’m done.” She looks over at Shaw. “I can’t play the good little soldier anymore. They have my father, and who knows what they’ve done to him. Well I’m going to make them pay for it.”

Alex glances at Kara, who’s still standing in the doorway with her fists clenched to offset the slight tremble in her chin. She looks at each of them in turn, and then up at the security camera in the corner for good measure.

“I am coming for their kingdom, and I’m gonna burn Thebes to the ground.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In Greek mythology, the legendary hero [Cadmus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmus) (/ˈkædməs/; Greek: Κάδμος _Kadmos_ ) was the founder and first king of Thebes. In seeking to establish the city of Thebes, Cadmus required water from a spring guarded by a water-dragon. He first sent his companions, but the dragon killed them all. Cadmus then succeeded in slaying the dragon; afterward, he sowed the dragon’s teeth in the ground, from which sprang a race of fierce armed warriors, called the _Spartoi_ (“sown”).
> 
> A [Cadmean victory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmean_victory) (Greek: _Kadmeia nike_ ) is a reference to a victory involving one’s own ruin. Although Cadmus eventually proved victorious, the victory cost the lives of those who were to benefit from the creation of Thebes.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Title and epigraph from[“Wait For It” (from _Hamilton_ )](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReTP6x_sDiM)
> 
> An alternate soundtrack to this chapter: [“We Don’t Eat” by James Vincent McMorrow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR3HRMO7nZg)


	4. longing for the moonlight; longing for the sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Maggie Chapter™
> 
> In which Alex learns how to let people care about her, and how not to be Perfect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not canon compliant in that Alex already knows she’s a Big Gay, but she does still need to do a lot of self-discovery and self-acceptance. (aka polyamory is Good and Pure, kids, you should try it. As long as you communicate, communication is important.)
> 
> Alex/Maggie/Lucy + Root/Shaw. They may or may not have all banged at some point, I am neither confirming nor denying whether a kinky five-way is something that happened at some point during the events of this chapter.

_No longing for the moonlight,_  
_No longing for the sun._  
_No longer will I curse the bad I’ve done._  
_If there’s a time when your feeling’s gone,_  
_I wanna feel it._

 

* * *

 

**i.**

John lasts a grand total of three weeks before the Machine decides to intervene. Turns out he has a hard time running numbers without an official cover, and J’onn’s reaction to news reports of a Manhattan urban legend suddenly making appearances in his city?

Well. He doesn’t exactly use is inside voice.

Reese agrees it’s for the best that the Man in the Suit hang up his ski mask for good and pick up a badge again instead, so She sets up a transfer for John Hawke of the NYPD’s fledgeling Extranormal Crimes Unit to National City as head of a new bicoastal joint task force to combat Project Cadmus.

After Samaritan, finally settling back into a real cover with a job and a sense of normalcy and _rules_ —it’s more of a relief than anything. In fact, it’s not much of a sacrifice at all, in the end. Especially not when a new human masked vigilante begins to make a name for himself in the city.

(John’s always been partial to suits of the tailored variety, but there’s something to be said for a gleaming suit of armor and a shield. He smirks a little when Winn and James try to pretend they’re not up to anything—they’re not exactly subtle, and when John watches them craft their first aliases, crackling with excitement at the thought of living double lives and fighting the good fight, all he can think of is how painfully _young_ they seem. But there was a time when John might have gone for the classic knight-in-shining-armor look, too.)

//

After his second day on the job at the NCPD, he finds Alex back at the DEO and sidles up to her looking positively gleeful.

Alex didn’t even know his facial muscles were capable of forming an expression like that.

They stand there in silence until she sighs and turns to him, raising her eyebrows expectantly. “Well? Something you want to share with the whole class, John?”

“So I met a friend of yours today,” John drawls.

Alex freezes.

“Sawyer, huh? Detective _Maggie_ Sawyer? You’re right, she is damn good at her job.” The tips of his ears are practically glowing red as he tries to suppress a grin. “You never mentioned how pretty she was.”

She scoffs unconvincingly, then sputters for a moment before snapping her jaw shut and forcefully clearing her throat.

“Is she? Huh. Hadn’t noticed. Well. I gotta g—”

The words barely make it out of her mouth before she gestures vaguely, turning on her heel to make a beeline for the nearest exit.

“Go, yeah.” John laughs under his breath. “You gotta go.”

 

**ii.**

They’ve been sleeping together for about a month before Maggie finally meets the rest of Team Machine. Even then, it’s entirely by accident and in spite of Alex’s best efforts.

Maggie ends up with a nasty head lac after a scuffle with a bicephalous reptilian-looking alien goes south. As it turns out, he was more terrified than hostile, and Maggie’s able to talk him down. (She’d crossed paths with some others of his kind a while back, and she has a gift for tongues. Apparently.)

Maggie talks him down; Maggie diffuses the situation more smoothly than Alex could have ever thought possible; Maggie leaves the scene with a new CI instead of a perp in cuffs.

Maggie completes the mission with an unfaltering megawatt smile and Maggie saves the day, but Maggie has blood tinged with a sickly green pus dripping from above her eye—and Alex panics.

She pulls Kara aside, even as the rest of Sawyer’s team is still congratulating her on a job well done.

“Get her out of here, Supergirl.”

“What- she’s fine, Alex. She said she’s just gonna hitch a ride back to HQ with the DEO van for debrief.”

“ _Now_ , Kara,” Alex whispers, voice low and clipped in a way that suddenly has Kara’s full attention.

 _You need to fly her back immediately_ , Alex wants to say, but the words are stuck in her throat. _Because alien neurotoxins and a potential concussion and the fact that I said so and—_

“Okay.” Kara nods softly and gives her sister’s arm a gentle squeeze. “I’ll take her, Alex. I’ve got her.”

Alex sends them off with a promise that she’ll follow on her bike, and she’s halfway there before she’s able to even really think.

Shit.

She’s been so careful about Maggie’s visits to the DEO—when the place was quiet and mostly empty, when they could have some privacy. Alex always stitched Maggie up herself. And Maggie never stayed long.

But tonight?

_Shit._

It’s not like she’s _trying_ to hide Maggie from them. She’s not ashamed of her, of what they’re doing. Of who they are to each other.

They’re not _anything_ to each other. Not really. That’s kind of the point.

She was _going_ to introduce them all to each other. At some point, when she finally planned it all out. When she was ready.

But the thought of Maggie there without her, of her carefully compartmentalized worlds coming together on this random night, when everyone else is still on duty and she’s stuck winding through traffic from the other side of the city—it leaves her with an inexplicable panic lodged deep in her chest.

She grips the handlebars tighter, and if she speeds just a little more recklessly than usual? Well, it’s not like she has a cop perched on the backseat and wrapped around her tonight.

//

“Holy _shit_ ,” Maggie laughs as she hops to her feet. “That’s it, I’m only flying Supergirl Airways from now on.” 

She smiles at Kara, all dimples and sheer joy, and Kara wonders why her sister won’t just _tell_ everyone about them already. (The perils of superhearing—though it’s almost worth the trauma of that experience to know how happy Alex is with Maggie, even if she refuses to admit it.)

“Thanks for the lift, Supergirl.”

“Don’t mention it,” Kara beams back. “First time’s always pretty exciting for most people. Next time I’ll show you what I can _really_ do.”

Kara glances around. “Hang on, Detective Sawyer… why don’t you head over to the med bay and I’ll find someone to take a look at your head.”

//

That someone ends up being Shaw, since Sawyer insisted she was fine and didn’t need to pull one of the DEO doctors away from an actual patient.

“No, Danvers was right,” Shaw says as she takes a swab of the blood from Maggie’s head to test for toxins. “You’re gonna need a few stitches, and trust me, trying to stitch your own face is not nearly as badass as it seems—unless you want to risk doing a hack job and marring that pretty mug of yours.”

Maggie raises an eyebrow.

“Oh no, not me,” Shaw laughs. “I’ve never done a hack job in my life. Please, you think I’d risk fucking up this face?”

She tilts her head toward the corner of the room, where Root is dressing a burn on her arm from a minor industrial accident.

“I saw that, Sameen.” Root doesn’t look up. “I’d be offended if I didn’t know you liked me a little _rugged_. And for the record,” she smirks and locks eyes with Shaw, “I like your face a little messy, too.”

Shaw just rolls her eyes and starts prepping Maggie’s wound for sutures.

(It would probably be easier if Maggie would hold her damn face still.)

“Damn.” Maggie shakes her head with a smile. “I like you guys.”

//

Maggie hangs out at the DEO after Shaw finishes patching her up.

She figures she should wait for Alex before she leaves—debriefing after the mission and all that.

It’s a flimsy excuse.

She knows Alex wasn’t ready for this—to work cases with her, sure. To grab a beer afterward, and then go home and fuck after that. It’s a comfortable routine for them at this point, but Maggie’s always known that there are aspects of Alex’s life that she’s not a part of yet. And she wasn’t ready to be, so she never pushed.

But now that she’s here, hanging out with Alex’s friends and her sister (no, _Supergirl_ —that’s another secret she’s not meant to know), she’s having a hard time remembering why.

Why she feels the need to keep making excuses to care about Alex, when they just keep getting flimsier.

She tries to be useful, to keep her hands busy while she waits, so she helps Shaw do inventory on a new batch of equipment that needs to be tested in the field.

And by “helps,” she means something more along the lines of drooling over some of the most beautiful weaponry she’s ever seen.

She lifts up a pistol and practically moans as she feels the heft of it in her palm.

Shaw smirks. “I know, right?”

“ _Fuck._ ”

Maggie opens up the next crate and lets out a low whistle when she sees a batch of prototypes for new biometric prisoner restraints.

“Damn. And I thought my gear was pretty.”

“Really?” Shaw laughs as she points to the standard NCPD-issue cuffs hanging from Sawyer’s belt. “Those?”

“Aw, it’s cute that you think I was talking about those. You haven’t seen my _nice_ handcuffs—I only break those out for special occasions.”

A loud clatter echoes near the doorway.

Both their heads snap up to find a slightly breathless Alex hastily grabbing her bike helmet from where she’d dropped it.

 

**iii.**

Maggie fights dirty.

Alex may have trained to fight superpowered aliens her entire life, but Maggie’s trained to fight humans. Men. The foulest, most despicable undercurrents of the human race—guys who had no concept of a good clean fight when it came to someone who looked like her.

Alex starts inviting her to spar at the DEO, and soon they have a standing workout date for Tuesdays and Thursdays after Maggie gets off work.

And Sawyer’s good. Some small part of Alex’s brain thinks Maggie really shouldn’t be as much of a challenge for her as she is, but she doesn’t dwell on it.

Those sparring sessions start becoming the highlight of Alex’s week, but Maggie keeps pushing for them to go out to train instead.

“Really, Danvers? You think you’re gonna be fighting your next perp in an illuminated plexiglass-and-chrome fishbowl?”

Turns out she’s a _good_ fighter under controlled conditions, but when they’re out in the field…

Holy fuck.

She can build an improvised explosive device out of pretty much anything. More than once she’s run out of bullets and knocked a perp out with a metal pipe or a cinderblock or her motorcycle instead. She can MacGyver restraints out of coils of electrical wire or industrial cable; once she tied up a trio of pyrotechnically-inclined aliens with a firehose after using it to douse them.

(Plus, she has a penchant for corny one-liners at the most inopportune times on the job, as if she grew up watching shitty old cop movies and still wants to see herself as the hero of one.

Alex rolls her eyes each time, but she can never seem to stop herself from smiling)

//

The amount of time Maggie and Shaw spend together in the DEO’s chem lab starts to make J’onn nervous.

“Relax, Mark Watney,” Root tells him. “They’re just having a little fun.”

Somehow, J’onn doesn’t find that very reassuring.

//

On Alex’s days with Bear, she brings him over to Maggie’s place for doggy dates. Bear and Marco take to each other immediately.

They bring the dogs to the beach, to the park, hiking in the hills overlooking the city. Maggie starts packing picnic baskets.

“Well, we have to eat,” she says.

The next time, Alex brings fresh juice from the farmers’ market. Maggie doesn’t say anything, but she smiles when Alex isn’t looking.

They’re still not in a relationship, Alex insists.

“I know, Danvers. But Marco doesn’t have many friends in National City, and he gets stir-crazy cooped up at home all day with no one to play with.” She winks.

(God, Alex hates it when she winks. As if the dimples weren’t enough to deal with. It’s so unfair.)

Maggie doesn’t mention that time Alex took her out to the DEO’s desert base in the middle of the night to watch a meteor shower from the bluffs overlooking the ocean. (“The light pollution in the city is terrible,” Alex had reasoned.)

They’re not in a relationship. When Alex goes home with Maggie after a mission, or after drinks, or after spending a day with their dogs, she’s always gone by morning. And Maggie’s never seen more of Alex’s place than her bedroom… and her bathtub, and her kitchen counter, and the lounge chair on the terrace.

They’re friends. Maggie has fully ingratiated herself into Team SuperMachine. Even though she’s never slept at Alex’s, she’s crashed at Shaw and Root’s place more times than she can count—when Marco decides he wants to spend the night, he’s 100 pounds of _not gonna budge_.

They’re not in a relationship. They don’t really know what they are to each other, and neither of them is quite ready to bring that question up.

But they’re _something_.

 

**iv.**

Lucy spends a lot of her time in DC now, part of her new gig as Special Advisor to the President on Alien Affairs and, unofficially, DEO liaison. President Marsdin had personally hired her shortly after Myriad—much to General Lane’s displeasure, considering the role his own botched handling of the crisis played in the President’s decision to hire his daughter.

Her flight back to National City lands at midnight; it’s the first time she’s been home since she started her new job, and she all she wants to do is crawl into her own bed for a change and pass out until morning.

But as soon as she walks up the last flight of stairs to her apartment door—

“Alex?”

—it’s pretty obvious that’s not happening.

“Luce, you’re home!” Alex’s voice pitches up with excitement, more than a little slurred. With some effort, she stands, bracing herself against the wall.

“And you’re drunk.”

Alex doesn’t respond. She’s staring silently at Lucy with a furrowed brow as if she hadn’t heard her at all, focused like she’s been trying to puzzle something out all night and the answer is hidden somewhere in Lucy’s face.

“I don’t know what to do, Luce,” she says finally, suddenly solemn. “I- I think I might be fucking up.”

//

“You know, when I texted to tell you I was coming home tonight so we should grab coffee, I meant like… _tomorrow_. I really wasn’t expecting a welcoming committee.”

Lucy sets two mugs on the coffee table in front of Alex—chamomile tea, not coffee—and folds herself up on the opposite end of the couch.

“I’m sorry,” Alex groans. “Oh god, Lucy, I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t be coming to you like this, I should just—”

“Alex.” Lucy interrupts, shifting over to place a hand on Alex’s knee before handing her a mug. “Relax. It’s fine.”

Lucy smiles, and she realizes she’s really glad that Alex is sitting on her couch right now, despite her earlier plans.

“I really missed you, Alex.”

Alex looks back up at her, finally, and smiles back. It’s more hesitant than Lucy would like—Alex’s vulnerability twists a little at her, it always has.

“I missed you, too, Luce.”

//

Alex tells her about Maggie.

The whole time, Alex has that look on her face that just makes Lucy want to reach out and wrap her arms around her, but she doesn’t. She’s shifted closer—she’s not on her side of the couch anymore—but she doesn’t touch Alex like she wants to.

Because there’s Maggie.

Because Alex is sitting on her couch on the verge of tears, telling her about Maggie like she’s guilty or something, so Lucy wonders if maybe this is Alex telling her that she isn’t allowed to hold her anymore.

“Okay, so you have a girlfriend now. I’m happy for you, Danvers.”

And she means it, even though she’s got a sinking feeling in her gut as she says it, like she’s falling. Like this time she put her career first and even though she knows it was the right move, she can’t help feeling like she missed a chance she was supposed to take.

But she does mean it. Alex deserves to be in a relationship. She deserves to be happy. To be in love.

Alex shakes her head. “No, Lucy, we’re not- it’s not—”

“I mean it, Danvers.” Lucy cringes a little. It feels wrong to call her Danvers, but she can’t help it. Alex has a girlfriend. “I’m glad you found someone. And you have nothing to feel bad about. The two of us, we were- that’s never what we were. Neither of us was ready for that. We both knew it. And then I left. I never had any illusions about what that meant.”

“Lucy…” Alex sighs. “Mags and I—I don’t think that’s what we are either. I don’t know _what_ we are. I know I care about her but…  I care about you, too, Luce.”

Alex glances up at Lucy and, for the first time tonight, doesn’t look away.

“I really missed you, Lucy.”

Lucy stares silently at Alex for a minute. Before she can figure out what to say, Alex reaches over and tucks a strand of Lucy’s hair behind her ear.

“Why did you come here tonight, Alex?”

“I missed you.”

//

It’s 3am by the time Lucy finally gets to crawl into her bed for the night.

Alex is there, too, lying on the side that was hers back when they were… whatever they were, before Lucy left for DC.

Lucy tucks herself into Alex’s side. It’s comforting, familiar in a way she doesn’t really want to think about, not when Alex has a g— not when Alex has a Maggie.

“This was probably a mistake, wasn’t it?” Lucy whispers into Alex’s neck.

“Probably.” Alex is staring up at the ceiling, as if she had Kara’s vision and could look straight through to the stars. “I don’t know.”

She looks down at Lucy. “It doesn’t feel like a mistake.” She hesitates for a moment. “Does it have to be?”

“Have you talked to Maggie about this?”

“Sort of. I’m- I’m not great at the whole talking thing.”

“Really?!” Lucy exclaims with a scandalized gasp. “I never would have guessed.”

Alex laughs and shoves her lightly. “Oh, shut up.”

“Well… you know I’ve been that girl. The girl trying to salvage a relationship with someone who always wanted someone else.”

“I know.” Alex’s voice is small, contrite.

“But the thing about that was…  Jimmy and I never talked about it. He always insisted there was nothing going on with Clark, that he and Kara were just friends. And yet, every single time, without fail, he always picked them first. That’s what hurt the most. It always felt like a competition I was losing, and not because I was up against superheroes. Jimmy refused to talk about it, so it felt like I was going to lose no matter how hard I tried because I wasn’t in the race at all.”

“I don’t want this to be a competition,” Alex whispers.

“Well. We’re talking now.” Lucy smiles softly and runs her thumb across Alex’s cheek. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be.”

 

**v.**

The first time they all hang out together outside of work, it’s a Sunday night and they’re piled onto Alex’s couch to watch Cat present Kara (well, Supergirl) with a humanitarian award on TV.

Kara had wanted to get them all tickets, but Lucy only has a few nights in National City before she flies back out to DC for three weeks, so she’s trying to spend as much time as she can at home. Plus, as Shaw so eloquently pointed out, people tend to get pissy when you show up at formal award shows in sweats, and she sure as shit ain’t putting on heels and a dress if she’s not allowed to pack heat under it and there isn’t even a _chance_ of fisticuffs in the forecast for the night.

So Shaw, true to form, is wearing a muscle tank and boxer briefs—a new pair that Root bought her with the House of El symbol on the front because _come on, Sam, show a little team spirit._ (Root is sporting a full-on footed onesie, complete with a blanket cape, because that was the outfit that annoyed Shaw most.)

Alex isn’t used to having this many people over at her place. She thinks she should probably feel a little uncomfortable, considering the fact that the longest relationship she’s ever had in her life has been with her own personal space, but she’s the one who invited them all over tonight.

She’s the one who decided to squeeze herself next to Lucy and entwine their legs together, despite the fact that there’s a perfectly good empty armchair she could have chosen to curl up in.

The two of them end up sitting on the floor in front of the couch because the dogs commandeered their seats while they were gathering snacks from the kitchen. Maggie is perched cross-legged on the couch behind Alex and Lucy; Alex can feel the warmth of her hand resting lightly on her shoulder the whole night.

She was worried about tonight, going into it. Despite the fact that she’d discussed it at length with all parties involved, she’s been waiting for something to go wrong. For someone to get uncomfortable (she was betting on herself), for someone to awkwardly get up and make a break for it halfway through the night (Alex was pretty sure the fact that it’s her apartment wouldn’t stop her from doing so).

But nothing happens.

It feels like the most natural thing in the world when Lucy wraps her arms around Alex’s waist and pulls her close. When Alex gets up to grab some more beers from the fridge, she doesn’t even think before leaning in to give Maggie a quick kiss as she passes.

There’s a blurring of the lines, of the carefully compartmentalized facets of Alex’s life, and Alex realizes she doesn’t mind it.

For her entire life, she’d devoted everything she was, every single piece of herself, to one person. She had to be perfect because Kara needed her to be, because her mother expected her to be, because her father never got a chance to be.

She had to be everything Kara needed in this world, so _Alex’s_ world—well, it had to be Kara. She made one person her entire world, everything she ever wanted or needed, and that was enough.

That’s just how she was built—how she _is_ built. She loves with a fierce loyalty and devotion, and she’s proud of that. But, as Alex looks at the women who surround her now, who have suddenly and unexpectedly filled her world, she thinks that maybe—

Maybe she doesn’t have to be everything to one person; maybe she doesn’t have to find one person to be everything to her.

Not everything. Just _something._

Something real and solid and warm.

She thought she might feel fractured like this, as if each part of her, each person she loves, is pulling her apart by the seams. She knows that feeling all too well.

But she doesn’t.

Tonight, Alex feels more whole than she ever has.

This thing they’re doing—it doesn’t make her feel the same way it would have before, like she was putting everyone else first only to always be their second choice. But it also doesn’t mean she cares any less about each of them.

(It doesn’t mean that she regrets any of the sacrifices she’s made for Kara.)

Because they’re all here, tonight, sprawled out across her couch to cheer on her sister—her heart, the biggest and brightest piece of her.

And this—this is enough. _She_ is enough. And for the first time in her life, she doesn’t doubt that. Doesn’t doubt _herself_. Not for a second.

This isn’t the perfect myth of what she’s supposed to want, of the person she’s supposed to be. But tonight, surrounded by this odd collection of strays, these people who are _hers_ , Alex can’t find any other word for it.

It’s perfect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and epigraph from [“Future Starts Slow” by The Kills](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpB_rBIgLmQ) (because of course—Alex is a good soldier; a good soldier does both.)
> 
> I’m not completely sure what kind of dog Marco is yet, but right now I’m leaning toward a Malamute GSD mix. Whatever he is, he’s a BIG boy. (When Maggie calls out for him, Alex sometimes yells “POLO,” and that’s how Maggie falls in love with Alex, because that is 100% exactly the reason she named him Marco.)

**Author's Note:**

> If you have prompts or suggestions for this AU, I'd love to hear them! Just leave them in the comments, or come talk to me on tumblr @ [sciencepolice](http://sciencepolice.tumblr.com).


End file.
